Romeo and Juliet

We had kind of a tough call last week, a double suicide, and my trainee did an outstanding job as she caught the first call. I did end up taking over, but whole story was extremely convoluded and just about everything about this call made it confusing.

First, we got the first call on a non-emergency line--not a call about "I found my __________ in her room with a gun on the floor." Not an, "I just heard a gun shot followed closely there after by another gun shot from my neighbors' house..."

Our first call was from a middle aged man who was not at the scene. He also might have been in a coma for all the urgency he let slip into his voice.

Long, winding story short, a middle aged woman who had been battling depression for years walked outside her house and shot herself. This is a bit unsual because most profiles of women who attempt suicide are for younger or older women (teens or elderly) and most do not use violent methods such as guns--they tend to favor pills or Carbon Monoxide etc. But apparently she meant it.

So her boyfriend comes home and finds her in the back yard. It was his gun. Distraught, he calls the woman's sister who lives half a state away in a little po-dunk town, on the eastern edge of BFE.

He tells her that her sister shot herself with his gun and that he was thinking about doing the same thing. He says all the cliche things about not having anything to live for, it all being his fault etc. The sister, in BFE, is a freaked out. She doesn't know how to talk to someone who is threatening suicide or talking about it.

It seems to me that she was acting under the widely held misconception that saying "suicide" or asking someone why they want to kill themselves could actually talk them into doing it. She didn't know that studies of suicides and attempts have shown that talking to someone about it, usually does more help than harm. The fact that the boyfriend called anyone shows that he was on the fence about it.

And believe me, there are enough 911 tapes out there that go like this:
dispatch: 911 what's your emergency?
caller: You'll find me at ____________ address."
dispatch: what's going on there sir.
[muffled pop noise followed by open line/dead air]

People who have their mind set on it don't talk about it, but they frequently want the police to have some idea because they hope the authorities will get to the body/clean up the mess before their loved-ones find them.

If you know someone who you think might be having suicidal thoughts, talk to them, talk to professionals about helping them, talk to anyone you can to try to intervene. I mean it. You really can help.

Unfortunately, the sister did not know this, and she thought not talking about suicide was the better course of action so she hung up on the boyfriend. The she asked her husband what he though they should do.

Not knowing the telephone number for the police in our city (as they lived so far away), they decided to call the husband's brother who did live in our city. He was the comatose call we got first.

My trainee got all the basics of the info from him and quickly too. She did very well. He was apparently on the cell phone with his sister in law half a state away, and on his home line with us. He was relaying info as best he could, but the circuitous route the info was taking (suicidal boyfriend to sister, to husband's brother to the call taker) was confusing. He hadn't had communication with anyone on scene, though he knew their address.

Getting better information was like pulling teeth because he was talking so slowly, and because he had ask the sister, listen to her, then relay the answer to us. Despite the delay in the third hand reporting, we got officers started pretty quickly.

I took up the call at about this point, because trying to figure out exactly who our caller was and how he knew something was going on at the house was getting confusing. I ended up hanging up with him and calling the sister in BFE directly to hear about the boyfriend's state of mind, and the actual words he was using on what turned out to be his last phone call, straight from her.

In the end, there wasn't anything officers could do. The couple was found laying next to each other in the side yard by the first officer to arrive. There were no calls from neighbors on either of the two gunshots, which both happened outside, and the call from the uninvolved brother in law was the only incoming call we had on the whole thing.

Sometimes it happens like that...some kid lights off a bottle rocket, and half a city block calls in about gun shots (some people even trying to guess at calibers etc) and when there is an actual gun shot (2 in this case) no one hears it.